This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (10 page)

‘What did you say to that?’ asked Rapke.

‘I said,’ muttered King between hard lips, ‘“Don’t be stupid.”’

A month or so after the Farquharsons parted, King was driving out of his street on
to the highway, heading west to the Winchelsea shops, when he saw Robbie sitting
in his white Commodore under a tree on the other side. He was looking straight ahead
in an easterly direction, down the road to Geelong. King made eye contact on his
way past, but kept going. Farquharson started his car and took off
in the opposite
direction.

When they ran into each other later that week, King asked him, ‘Was that you sitting
under a tree? What were you doing?’

‘I was thinking,’ replied Farquharson, ‘about lining a truck up.’

King went home and reported this to his wife. They agreed that it was Robbie ‘talking
shit again’, and swept it under the carpet.

…

One Friday evening in the winter of 2005, a few months before Father’s Day, Mary
King asked her husband to drive to the fish-and-chip shop and bring home some hot
chips for tea. Lucy and Lachlan, their two youngest kids, went along for the ride.
King sent them into the shop to order, while he waited outside in the car.

As it happened, Farquharson was in the shop with his three boys. He wandered out
and stood by King’s open window to chat. He seemed tired and down in the dumps. His
mood did not improve when Cindy Gambino drove up and parked. She walked past and
greeted the men by name. King spoke to her, but Farquharson would not. When Gambino
disappeared into the shop, King rebuked him for his rudeness.

‘You have to say hello. Come on, Robbie. You have to move on a bit.’

‘No, you don’t,’ said Farquharson. He was very angry. ‘Nobody does that to me and
gets away with it. That fucking car she’s driving, I paid $30,000 for it. She wanted
it, and they’re fucking driving it. Look what I’m driving—the fucking shit one. And
now it looks like she wants to marry that fucking dickhead. There’s no way I’m going
to let him and her and the kids live together in my house, and I have to fucking
pay for it and also pay maintenance for the kids—no way.’

‘You have to move on,’ insisted King.

Farquharson said, ‘How?’

In the court, a tense pause. Rapke waited, squinting, face upturned. King shifted
from foot to foot. He stammered. With an effort of will, he kept going: ‘And then
he said, “I’m going to take away the most important things that mean to her.” I asked
him what that would be, and he nodded his head towards the fish-and-chip shop window.

‘I said, “What—the kids?”

‘He said, “Yes.”

‘I said, “What would you do? Take them away or something?”

‘He just stared at me in my eyes and said, “Kill them.”’

From the dock Farquharson looked across at his sisters and violently shook his head.
He kept squinching up his eyes and tucking his chin into his collar, in a pantomime
of incensed denial.

King stopped to collect himself. He picked up the glass with a shaking hand and took
a great swig of water.

‘I said, “Bullshit. It’s your own flesh and blood, Robbie.”’

His voice was barely audible. Farquharson strained to hear, his eyebrows high in
his forehead.

‘He said, “So? I hate them.”

‘I said, “You’d go to gaol.”

‘He said, “No I won’t. I’ll kill myself before it gets to that.”

‘I asked him how. He said it would be close by. I said, “
What
?”

‘He said, “There’d be an accident involved where I survive and the kids don’t. It’d
be on a special day.”

‘I said, “What kind of day?”

‘He said, “Something like Father’s Day, so everyone would remember it. Father’s Day,
and
I
was the one to have them for the last time—not her. Then she suffers for the
rest of her life every Father’s Day.”

‘I said, “You don’t even dream of that stuff, Robbie!”’

At that moment Lucy and Lachlan ran out of the shop with the chips. King drove them
home. His wife was busy cooking the evening meal. She was cross with him for having
taken so long. The TV was on, the family room full of the teatime racket of four
young children. King told Mary about the conversation. They disregarded it as another
bout of Robbie’s shit. For several months they thought no more about it.

Then came Father’s Day. At eleven o’clock that night the Kings got a phone call from
some friends in the town. Robbie had had an accident and the boys had drowned in
a dam.

‘It all come back to me, the conversation,’ said King. He swallowed hard. ‘I asked
how Robbie was. They said “Robbie’s well. He’s in hospital.” I was speechless. I
was—shattered.’ Muscles stood out in his jaw and neck. He gripped the rail of the
witness stand.

Rapke peered up at him from the bar table. For the next chapter of the story he needed
his witness to stay in one piece.

‘We’ll do this,’ he said, ‘step by step.’

King’s boss at the bus company noticed the wrecked state his employee was in, and
started asking questions. King broke down and spilt the beans. The boss, who was
a former member of the police force, made some calls. Eleven days later, on the morning
after Jai, Tyler and Bailey were buried, two detectives from the Homicide
Squad drove
from Melbourne to King’s house in Winchelsea. When they had listened to his story,
they asked King if he would go to visit Farquharson at his father’s place, raise
the subject of the fish-and-chip-shop conversation and tape his mate’s responses
on a hidden recorder.

That same evening, after dark, the devastated King met the detectives at the Modewarre
boat ramp, a drought-stricken launching place at the end of an unsealed road a few
kilometres east of Winchelsea. In this obscure and tree-sheltered spot, the detectives
set him up with a wire. King drove away from the shrunken lake and headed back to
the town, with microphones stuck to his torso and a recorder down the front of his
pants.

…

The tape that King came away with that night, which the Crown now proposed to play
to the jury, was an hour and forty minutes long. The subject of the fish-and-chip-shop
conversation was not raised until forty-seven pages into the transcript. Rapke, the
prosecutor, had little interest in what he called ‘banter between men about football’.
He asked Justice Cummins’ leave to edit the tape down to the ten pages that he considered
relevant—a mere twenty minutes’ worth. But Morrissey leapt to his feet. No! The whole
tape must be played, for what it revealed about Farquharson’s mental state, and about
the relationship between the two friends.

Justice Cummins ruled in Morrissey’s favour. While everyone moved and stretched,
preparing for another bout of intense concentration, Cummins reminded the jury that
the evidence was not the
typed transcript they had been given to follow. The transcript
was only a guide. The evidence was the sounds on the tape. He urged them to pay attention
to pauses, to emphasis and tone.

…

The King we hear greet his friends—he is taken aback to find another mate, Mick Stocks,
already ensconced with Farquharson—is at first hardly recognisable as the choked
figure on the witness stand. His voice is expressive to the point of being musical.
We
, he says, like a social worker or a doctor. How are we? How are we going, mate?
All right? He apologises for ‘yesterday’ but says he has been ‘up there’ this morning,
to pay respect.

‘Yesterday=funeral,’ scrawled Louise. ‘He didn’t go?’ We sat forward.

But after these awkward greetings, the three men subside into an hour of rambling,
murmuring talk. Football, cars, more football. Is it cheaper to drive or fly to Queensland?
Football again. The beauty of Las Vegas rising out of the desert: they dream of seeing
it. A new cure for snoring, the price of firewood, King’s damaged knee and imminent
arthroscopy, yet more football. Somehow Farquharson keeps his end up while the others
tactlessly compare notes on the sporting and educational progress of local children.
On and on it winds, the droning of nasal voices, this visit by men helpless to address
the reason for their call: their mate’s appalling loss. And all the while in the
background, faithful to its task of relieving social anxiety, the television pours
out manic energy: screeching tyres, a gunshot, a woman’s scream, a police siren,
a
booming American voice-over.

Farquharson, like the jury, had been provided with headphones, which made him look
oddly more adult. The transcript lay open on the chair beside him and he stooped
over it, his only expression one of distant scepticism. Some of the journalists seemed
to be already writing their pieces. In the family seats the women held themselves
erect. Kerri Huntington played a little private game with the cuffs of her cardigan,
making them dance and do silent claps. But the dark-jacketed shoulders of Farquharson’s
brothers-in-law were bowed forward, their elbows braced against their knees and their
hands clasped in the churchgoer’s posture: the endurance of tedium. I noticed a small,
silky brown head between Stephen Moules and Bev Gambino. It was Cindy. She was rocking
gently back and forth in her seat.

After a hundred minutes of laborious talk, the good-humoured Mick takes his leave.
King and Farquharson are at last alone.

‘Hey,’ says King in a hoarse whisper. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I know.’ Farquharson’s voice is drab, distant. He sounds weary, forcing himself
to be hostly. The TV for a moment goes silent. ‘A lot of people didn’t come. I understand
that. It’s a million times harder for me, so you don’t have to say nothing. I know.’

The hidden microphone is picking up King’s nervous breathing. He seizes the nettle.
‘But something’s been bugging me, though. Remember? Down at the fish shop? Out the
front? That discussion.’

‘Discussion? About what?’

‘This is what’s been eating me up,’ says King. He sounds on the verge of tears. ‘When
Cindy pulled up and you said you’d pay her back big-time. I hope it’s got nothing
to do with that.’

‘No. No way,’ says Farquharson. ‘No, no, no, no, no. You know I would never—’

‘Because listen,’ whispers King. ‘They’re coming to interview me. Tomorrow. I’m freaking
out.’

And this—King’s first straight-out lie—was the moment at which Morrissey’s insistence
on playing the whole tape seemed fated to backfire. For the preceding hour and a
half Farquharson has come across as dully slumped, battling to be sociable, barely
able to inject expression into his speech: a man who has lost his reason to live.
But now a shot of adrenalin galvanises him. He shows no surprise at what King has
said. Immediately he takes command.

‘Right,’ he says, his voice at confidential volume but very firm. ‘I can tell you.
Don’t stress. Don’t freak out. Just tell who I am, what I represent and all that,
I never,
ever
would do anything like that.’

‘I’ve been off work,’ murmurs King miserably. ‘I shook, and all.’

Farquharson canters straight over him. ‘All you have to say to them is who I am.
As far as you know, we got along. She’s
told
them that we got along. It was just
a figure of speech of me being angry. But I would never do anything like that. I’ve
got to live with this for the rest of my life, and it kills me.’

‘Oh,’ stammers King, ‘but that’s what’s been killing
me
.’

Their voices are low and tense. They must be sitting facing each other, leaning in.

‘I’ve been up there,’ says Farquharson, with a muffled force. ‘I went through four
and a half hours of hell. I looked everyone in the eye and I’ve told the truth. I’m
not lying to anyone. All you’ve got to do is say, “He’s a good bloke. I’ve known
him for a long time. He’s always been good with his kids.” And if they ask about
us, say, “As
far as I know, they got along.” Or if you don’t know something, say,
“
I don’t know that.”’

‘I’m scared, mate,’ says King, dry-mouthed, his voice full of darkness.

‘They’re not gonna ask ya. Don’t be scared. Look at the positive things.’ Farquharson’s
voice rises a few tones, and starts to flow. ‘They’ve interviewed her. They’ve said
she said, “No way known would he do anything like that.” What—I’m not a mongrel,
I’m not a bastard, I’m not an arsehole, I’m not a cunt. I would never, ever,
ever
.
That has never entered my mind. What I meant by paying her back was “One day I’ll
stand here with a woman in front of you and see how you like it.” Say you know me.
“He’s always spoilt his kids. Taking them to the footy, playing footy with them.”
All the times you’d be going for a walk and you’d see us going for a bike ride. Heavily
involved with the kids and their sport. Look at all the good things you saw that
I done. Always say the positive things.’

‘Rob, it’s driving me crazy, mate.’

‘You can’t say something like that, because then they’ll get thinking…’ He trails
off, then rallies. ‘We did get along. We did, in the end. Look, she doesn’t
blame
me. I tell you right now, if I did that on purpose I would’ve killed myself. I’ve
looked everyone in the eye. I’ve told the truth. I’ve had this flu. I had a coughing
fit. I’ve blacked out. That is no bullshit. I’ve got to live with myself. I’ve got
to.’

‘Oh Jesus, mate!’ King bursts out.

‘
And
,’ says Farquharson, ‘I loved
them
more than life itself.’

Without using the word, he slides into the subject of suicide. ‘That’s why Cindy’s
telling me to be strong. I wanted to go. No one will let me. She’s told me I’m backing
down if I do. I’ve had extensive
counselling. I still am. I was over-protective.
Very over-protective. And I still am. I feel I can’t protect them here. I asked her
permission and her blessing, and she said no.’

Cindy Gambino listened, leaning forward, her eyes raised to a point on the wall above
the jury’s heads. Their faces were inscrutable.